Wild gay

There are still people out there who think that being gay is “unnatural,” but they couldn’t be more wrong. Same-sex behavior, from co-parenting to mate-attraction behavior to sex, is incredibly. For these animals, there is documented evidence of homosexual behavior of one or more of the following kinds: sex, courtship, affection, pair bonding, or parenting, as noted in researcher and author Bruce Bagemihl 's book Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity.

The Wild West wasn't all six-shooters, saloons, and tough-as-rawhide cowboys herding cattle along dusty trails. As with today's gay rodeo scene, queer people were part of the mix, too, and some of them were indeed as tough as rawhide. Oscar Wilde was indeed a gay. (source: britishheritage) Wilde’s fame and success as a playwright and poet were overshadowed by the legal consequences of his personal life.

It’s crucial to acknowledge that the contemporary concept of “gay” as an identity did not exist during Oscar Wilde’s era. Homosexuality has been documented in more than species of vertebrates signaling that sexual preference is biologically determined in animals. From Male bonobos that hang from trees and engage. Wilde is glorified on a plinth: a creamy statue dressed as a dandy, his prison number from his time served in Reading Gaol, C.

Directly behind Wilde is a large neo-Gothic stained glass window of Jesus, drawing an association of martyrdom between the two men. He might have married the writer Constance Lloyd, but this was clearly a smokescreen to conceal his true sexuality, for he had numerous affairs with men, from Robbie Ross to Lord Alfred Douglas. Subsequently, over the past 50 years, Wilde has been adopted by the LGBTQ movement as a secular saint, the ultimate symbol of a persecuted gay man.

Is this a fair representation of his life and sexuality? Wilde was, after all, a man of contradictions. Wilde was at the peak of his career. He had been married to Lloyd for 11 years and they had two children, Cyril and Vyvyan. It was an open secret that Wilde was having a love affair with Lord Alfred Douglas, the son of the Marquess of Queensberry. Lord Alfred had introduced Wilde to the sexual underground, where they would rent young men for sex.

Several confrontations took place between Wilde and the Marquess, who was a volatile and angry man; Wilde denied any sexual relations with his son. The spelling mistake may have been deliberate, as well as the use of ambiguous language, which would make it easier to win a case if Wilde sued. Nevertheless, it was a trap that played on the Victorian need for masks of heterosexual respectability.

To simply look like a sodomite, in a society that had rigid ideas about gender, was a risky situation to be in. Wilde decided to take Queensberry to court, not to defend himself as a homosexual passionately fighting a cause — but to clear his reputation.

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The trial was a key moment in the evolution of the shaping of sexuality — whether hetero or homo — as an identity. Prior to the Victorian era, sex was a practice, not an identity. The Victorians introduced the Offences Against the Person Act in , which removed the death penalty for sodomy, but created a new punishment: 10 years to life penal servitude. The libel case collapsed and suddenly Wilde found that he was now the one on trial.

The criminalisation of homosexuality went hand in hand with attempts to classify it. Victorian sexologists such as Richard von Krafft-Ebing perceived homosexuality as a pathology, a deviation that stemmed from arrested development. A growing public hostility to inversion was accompanied by a collective curiosity: what were the characteristics of a man who loved men?

How did he dress? How did he behave? In later decades, inverts came to be seen as predators.

In , the Cleveland Street Scandal erupted, where a number of teenagers working as telegraph boys at the General Post Office were revealed to be moonlighting as rent boys at Cleveland Street, a brothel frequented by wealthy individuals such as Lord Somerset and the Earl of Euston. The scandal filled the tabloids week after week. The boys were seen as innocents; public ire was aimed at the older men who procured them.

When Wilde took the libel case against Queensberry to court, he underestimated the danger he was in. He was a peculiarly plain boy. As the prosecution closed in on him, Wilde gave a speech that many applaud as the first by a homosexual publicly defending his sexuality in fact, that honour ought to go to the German sexology pioneer Karl Heinrich Ulrichs in Having studied Classics at Oxford, he saw his sexuality in the tradition of pederasty, a practice dating back to ancient Greece and Rome where an older man would play sexual guide and intellectual mentor to a younger boy.

But consider the horrors that Wilde faced once he entered prison.